Passives in cross-modal lexical priming. There have been many theoretical accounts of the
syntactic structure of passives ('Mary was kissed by Bill') where Mary is the subject of the
sentence but the one undergoing the action (but not the agent). Previous work on the
processing of these structures found that while they appear to be more complex than active
sentences (Bill kissed Mary) on a number of offline measures, the online results provide a
different picture. To clarify this issue, we offer a project that will use the Cross Modal
Lexical Priming technique while correcting for some potential problems with the stimuli and
methods of previous studies.